Re: makewhatis for man page changes

On Wed, 24 Jul 2019, Jungle Boogie wrote:

> Hi All,
>
> Turns out I don't know everything and I need to read man pages from
> time-to-time. I'm sure you're like me and also want to consult the man pages.
> How do you do it on applications you've installed from source?
>
> Reading makewhatis.8, I think this is the tool I would use.
>
> # makewhatis -D -a /usr/local/share/man

As far as I know, that will create a mandoc.db on /usr/local/share/man
That's an index for use with apropos(1) and whatis(1).

> but this doesn't work:
> $ man 1 nmap
> man: No entry for nmap in section 1 of the manual.
>
> What am I doing wrong?

You have to tell man to look on other paths. That can be done setting
the MANPATH env variable. In your case something like:

MANPATH=/usr/local/share/man:

Note the ':' at the end. That means that path will be prepended to the
default list of paths to look for man pages.

Check man(1) for more info.

Cheers,

--
Paco Esteban.
https://onna.be/gpgkey.asc
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